Republican
presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said Sunday he will not
run from his statement 15 years ago that AIDS patients
should have been isolated.
Huckabee
acknowledged the prevailing scientific view then and since
that the virus that causes AIDS is not spread through
casual contact, but he said that was not certain. He
cited revelations in 1991 that a dentist had infected
a patient in an extraordinary case that highlighted the risk
of infection through contact with blood or bodily fluids.
''I still believe
this today,'' he said in a broadcast interview, that
''we were acting more out of political correctness'' in
responding to the AIDS crisis. ''I don't run from it,
I don't recant it,'' he said of his position in 1992.
Yet he said he would state his view differently in
retrospect.
Huckabee, as a
U.S. Senate candidate that year, told the Associated Press
that ''we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers
of this plague'' if the federal government was going
to deal with the spread of the disease effectively.
''It is the first time in the history of civilization
in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been
isolated from the general population, and in which this
deadly disease for which there is no cure is being
treated as a civil rights issue instead of the true
health crisis it represents,'' he said then.
In an interview
on Fox News Sunday, the former Arkansas
governor denied those words were a call to quarantine the
AIDS population, although he did not explain how else
isolation would be achieved. ''I didn't say we should
quarantine,'' he said. The idea was not to ''lock
people up.''
The activist
group People for the American Way had highlighted Huckabee's
1992 statement in a report published last week and on its
Right Wing Watch blog. In a press release issued
Monday, political director Mary Jean Collins said,
"Mike Huckabee is denying his own dangerous
demagoguery, but his words are plain for everyone to see."
Huckabee stated
his 1992 positions in an AP questionnaire in which he
also called homosexuality ''an aberrant, unnatural, and
sinful lifestyle.''
He outlined his
views for the AP more than a year after President George
H.W. Bush, a fellow Republican, urged an audience of
business executives not to fire or otherwise
discriminate against employees infected with HIV, the
virus that causes AIDS.
''There is only
one way to deal with an individual who is sick -- with
dignity, compassion, care, confidentiality and without
discrimination,'' Bush said in a speech on March 29,
1990. He also urged Congress ''to get on with the job
of passing a law'' to prohibit discrimination against
people infected with HIV.
Republican
presidential rival Rudy Giuliani declined to discuss the
matter during a separate television interview Sunday, except
to say he had heard Huckabee say it was not ''his
current position.''
''I have enough
of my own statements and issues that I have to deal
with,'' the former New York mayor said, laughing.
Giuliani, who
appeared on NBC television's Meet the Press,
said in response to a question that he did not believe
homosexuality was aberrant.
''The way
somebody leads their life isn't sinful. It's the acts,''
said Giuliani, who supports gay rights and lived with
a gay couple after separating from his second wife
while mayor. ''It's the various acts that people
perform that are sinful, not the orientation that they
have.'' (AP)
